Since the spring of 2020, Harvard Hillel has been pleased to share discussions with some of Harvard's and our world's top thinkers and doers with our community. This page includes full videos of the online discussions we've hosted so far. For information about upcoming events, please join our email list.
A special conversation with Israeli Harvard students on campus and Harvard alumni in Israel as they share and reflect upon their experiences of October 7.
Prof. Noah Feldman specializes in constitutional studies, with a particular emphasis on the relationship between law and religion, free speech, constitutional design, and the history of legal theory. The Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and director of the Julis-Rabinowitz Program on Jewish and Israeli Law at Harvard Law School, he is also a Senior Fellow of the Society of Fellows at Harvard. In 2003 he served as senior constitutional advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, and subsequently advised members of the Iraqi Governing Council on the drafting of the Transitional Administrative Law or interim constitution. He is the author of nine books.
Walter Russell Mead is the Ravenel B. Curry III Distinguished Fellow in Strategy and Statesmanship at Hudson Institute, a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, and Professor of Foreign Affairs and Humanities at Bard College in New York. He has authored numerous books, including The Arc of A Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Future of the Jewish People.
with Joshua Cohen and James Wood
Joshua Cohen is the recipient of the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in fiction, and the National Jewish Book Award for The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family. He is the author of five other novels and four story collections.
James Wood is a staff writer at The New Yorker and Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism at Harvard University. Widely considered one of the world's top literary critics, he is the author of How Fiction Works, as well as two essay collections, The Broken Estate and The Irresponsible Self, and a novel, The Book Against God.
with Rabbi Shai Held and Arnold Eisen
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel was a towering theologian and activist who left an indelible mark on the civil rights movement and the American Jewish community. January 2023 marks the 50th anniversary of Heschel's death (yahrzeit).
Rabbi Shai Held is a theologian, scholar, educator, and president and dean at Hadar. He has taught both theology and Halakhah at the Jewish Theological Seminary and also served as director of education at Harvard Hillel.
Arnold Eisen is one of the world's foremost authorities on American Judaism. He is professor of Jewish Thought and chancellor emeritus of the Jewish Theological Seminary.
Tzipi Livni was first elected to Israel's Parliament, the Knesset, in 1999 and has since held numerous ministerial positions including: Minister of Foreign Affairs and Vice Prime minister (the first woman to hold this position since Golda Meir), Minister of Justice, Minister of Regional Cooperation, Minister of Immigrant Absorption, Minister of Housing and Construction, Minister of Agriculture, Leader of the opposition, Leader of Center Party Kadima (the biggest party in the parliament) and leader of Hatnua Party.
with Professor Benjamin M. Friedman
Benjamin M. Friedman is the William Joseph Maier Professor of Political Economy, and formerly Chairman of the Department of Economics, at Harvard University. He has written or edited 17 books, including The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth and Religion and the Rise of Capitalism — a fundamental reassessment of the foundations of current-day economics showing how religious thinking has shaped economic thinking ever since the beginnings of modern Western economics and how this influence continues to be relevant today, especiall in the United States.
with Rabbi Yoni Rosensweig
Rabbi Yoni Rosensweig is rabbi of the Netzah Menashe commuity in Beit Shemesh, Israel. Previously, he served as Rosh Yeshiva (academic head) of Yeshivat Shevut Yisrael in Efrat. Rabbi Rosensweig is the author of several books including the recent Nafshi Beshe’elati on Jewish law and mental health.
with Ysoscher Katz, Matty Lichtenstein, David N. Meyers, and Nomi M. Stolzenberg
Ysoscher Katz is the Chair of the Department of Talmud at Yeshivat Chovevei Torah Rabbinical School.
Matty Lichtenstein is a research fellow at Brown University focusing on social policy, health, gender, and culture. Her recent publications have appeared in the American Journal of Sociology and Qualitative Sociology.
David N. Meyers is Distinguished Professor of History and Chair of Jewish History at UCLA. He is the author of American Shtetl: The Making of Kiryas Joel, a Hasidic Village in Upstate New York.
Nomi M. Stolzenberg is Nathan and Lilly Shapell Chair in Law at USC Gould School of Law. She is the author of American Shtetl: The Making of Kiryas Joel, a Hasidic Village in Upstate New York.
with Mark Oppenheimer
Mark Oppenheimer is the host of the new podcast Gatecrashers, which tells the story of how Jews fought for acceptance at elite schools, and how the Jewish experience in the Ivy League shaped American higher education, and shaped America at large. He is senior editor at Tablet Magazine and has contributed to many publications including The New York Times Magazine, Mother Jones, and The New York Times, where he was the Belief columnist.
with Yossi Klein Halevi
Yossi Klein Halevi is a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. He co-directs the Institute's Muslim Leadership Initiative, which teaches emerging young Muslim American leaders about Judaism, Jewish identity and Israel. He is co-host, together with Donniel Hartman and Elana Stein Hain, of the Hartman Institute's podcast, “For Heaven’s Sake.” Halevi’s 2013 book Like Dreamers, won the Jewish Book Council Everett Book of the Year Award. His latest book, Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor, is a New York Times bestseller and has appeared in a dozen languages.
with Jonathan Greenblatt
Jonathan Greenblatt is CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, the world's leading anti-hate organization with a distinguished record of fighting antisemitism and advocating for just and fair treatment for all. Jonathan joined ADL in 2015 after serving as special assistant to President Obama and director of the Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation. He had a distinguished career in business as a successful social entrepreneur and corporate executive: he cofounded Ethos Brands, founded All for Good, and served as a senior executive at realtor.com. He is the author of It Could Happen Here: Why America is Tipping from Hate to the Unthinkable — And How We Can Stop It.
with Lila Corwin Berman and Danielle Durchslag
Lila Corwin Berman is Chair of American Jewish History at Temple University, where she directs the Feinstein Center for American Jewish History. She is the author of The American Jewish Philanthropic Complex: The History of a Mulitbillion-Dollar Institution, which has been awarded prizes from the Organization of American Historians and the American Jewish Historical Society.
Danielle Durchslag is an artist and filmmaker based in Brooklyn. The great-granddaughter of Nathan Cummings, she was born into what she describes as a "Jewish Dynasty." In her art, she explores the psychological and political complexities of the world of Jewish American wealth in which she grew up.
with Evan Osnos
Evan Osnos is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where he covers foreign affairs and politics and is the author of the recently released Joe Biden: The Life, The Run, and What Matters Now. His book Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China won the 2014 National Book Award and was a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize. Previously, Osnos worked as Beijing bureau chief for the Chicago Tribune.
with Sarah Botstein and Mike Welt
Sarah Botstein is co-director and producer of The U.S. and The Holocaust. She has produced some of the most popular and acclaimed documentaries on PBS. Her work with director Ken Burns and Lynn Novick includes Hemingway, College Behind Bars, The Vietnam War, Prohibition, The War, and Jazz.
Mike Welt is producer of The U.S. and The Holocaust. Previously, he was a co-producer on The Vietnam War and Prohibition and associate prodcuer on The Tenth Inning. Mike began his career as a news producer at CNN and holds a Master of Journalism degree from UC Berkeley.
with Lydia Dugdale
Lydia Dugdale, MD, MAR is Associate Professor of Medicine at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons. Her scholarship focuses on end-of-life issues, medical ethics, and the doctor-patient relationship. She edited Dying in the Twenty-First Century and is the author of The Lost Art of Dying, a popular press book on the preparation for death.
with Idan Dershowitz
Idan Dershowitz is Chair of Hebrew Bible Exegesis at the University of Potsdam. In 2017 he was selected for Harvard's Society of Fellows. Dershowitz's dramatic claim that a long-thought forgery is both authentic and the oldest existing biblical manuscript was recently profiled in the New York Times. He is the author of The Dismembered Bible: Cutting and Pasting Scripture in Antiquity and The Valediction of Moses: A Proto-Biblical Book.
Michael Fertik is a published fiction author, poet, produced film writer, and playwright. His recently released Hip Set is set in Tel Aviv. Fertik's writing has won numerous prizes and includes a New York Times best seller. The executive chairman and founder of Reputation.com and lecturer on law at Harvard Law School, he is also the founder and managing partner of Heroic Ventures, a top venture firm that invests in early-stage companies chiefly in Silicon Valley and Israel.
with Robert Putnam
Robert Putnam is the Malkin Research Professor of Public Policy at Harvard and the former dean of the Kennedy School of Government. A recipient of the Skytte Prize, the world’s highest accolade for a political scientist, he has written fifteen books, including Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, among the most cited and bestselling social science works in the last half century. Last year he published The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again.
with Steven Levitsky
Steven Levitsky is the Director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University. His research focuses on democratization, authoritarianism, political parties, and weak and informal institutions. He is the author (with Daniel Ziblatt) of How Democracies Die, a New York Times Best-Seller that has been published in 25 languages, and has written frequently for the New York Times, Foreign Affairs, Vox, and The New Republic.
with David Brooks
David Brooks is a columnist for The New York Times and a commentator on "PBS NewsHour," NPR's "All Things Considered," and NBC's "Meet the Press." He is the author of five books including The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement, which was a No. 1 New York Times best seller. He teaches at Yale University and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
with Thomas Friedman
Thomas L. Friedman is an internationally renowned author, reporter, and columnist. He is the recipient of three Pulitzer Prizes — two for international reporting from the Middle East and a third for his columns written about 9/11. He is the author of seven New York Times bestsellers including From Beirut to Jerusalem. Friedman earned his B.A. from Brandeis in 1975 and was awarded a Marshall Scholarship by the British government and earned an M.Phil in Modern Middle East Studies from St. Antony's College, Oxford.
with Sarah Hurwitz
Sarah Hurwitz was a senior speechwriter for President Barack Obama and then served as head speechwriter for First Lady Michelle Obama. Before working at the White House, Sarah was chief speechwriter for Hillary Clinton during her 2008 presidential primary campaign. A graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School, she is the author of Here All Along: Finding Meaning, Spirituality, and a Deeper Connection to Life — In Judaism (After Finally Choosing to Look There).
with Michael Pollan
Michael Pollan is professor of the practice of non-fiction at Harvard, professor of journalism at UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism, and the director of Berekeley's Knight Program in Science and Environmental Journalism. The author of eight books, six of which are New York Times bestsellers, his articles have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Harper's, and many other publications. In 2010, he was chosen by Time Magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world.
with Shoshana Zuboff
Shoshana Zuboff is the Charles Edward Wilson Professor Emerita at Harvard Business School and a former faculty associate at Harvard Law School. She is the author of three books, including The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future in the New Frontier of Power, which reveals a world in which technology users are neither customers, employees, nor products. Instead they are the raw material for new procedures of manufacturing and sales that define an entirely new economic order: a surveillance economy.
Larry Brown is widely considered one of the greatest basketball coaches of all time. A member of the Basketball Hall of Fame, he is the only coach to win both NCAA and NBA championships. He won over 1,200 NBA and ABA games and coached a record eight teams to the playoffs. As a player, he won a gold medal in the 1961 Maccabiah Games, Olympic gold in 1964, and holds the ABA record for most assists in a game.
Ezekiel Emanuel MD, PhD is Vice President for Global Initiatives and chair of the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy at the University of Pennsylvania. A Harvard alumnus, he has served as special advisor for health policy to the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget. Since 1997 he has been chair of the Department of Bioethics at the Clinical Center of the National Institutes of Health and a breast oncologist. Dr. Emanuel has written and edited nine books and over 200 scientific articles. He is currently a columnist for the New York Times.
Lawrence S. Bacow is the 29th president of Harvard University. He is one of the most widely experienced leaders in American higher education, known for his commitment to expanding student opportunity, catalyzing academic innovation, and encouraging universities' civic engagement and service to society. Bacow is the former president of Tufts University and past Chancellor and Chair of the Faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
with Imam Khalil Abdur-Rashid
Imam Dr. Khalil Abdur-Rashid is the first full-time University Muslim Chaplain at Harvard University, Instructor of Muslim Studies at Harvard Divinity School, and Public Policy lecturer at Harvard Kennedy School. Previously, he was the Muslim Chaplain at Columbia University and Barnard College and served as an advisor to the NYC police commisioner.
with Steven Pinker
Steven Pinker is an experimental cognitive psychologist and a popular writer on language, mind, and human nature. His research on vision, language, and social relations has won prizes from the National Academy of Sciences and numerous other organizations. He is the author of many books and has been named Humanist of the Year, Foreign Policy's "100 Global Thinkers," and Time Magazine's "100 Most Influential People in the World Today."
with Pardis Sabeti
Pardis Sabeti is a computational geneticist at the Center for Systems Biology and Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University and Department of Immunology and Infectious Disease at the Harvard School of Public Health. A member of the Broad Institute and a former Rhodes Scholar, Dr. Sabeti has spent years studying viral spread, including on college campuses.
with Lloyd Blankfein
Lloyd Blankfein is senior chairman of The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. A graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School, Lloyd's nonprofit affiliations include the Harvard Global Advisory Council, the Dean's Advisory Board at Harvard Law School, the Board of Dean's Advisors at Harvard Business School, the Dean's Council of Harvard University, and the Board of Overseers of Weill Cornell Medical College. He is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
with Rabbi Shai Held and Michael Sandel
Rabbi Shai Held is a theologian, scholar, educator, and president and dean at Machon Hadar. He has taught both theology and Halakhah at the Jewish Theological Seminary and also served as director of education at Harvard Hillel.
Michael Sandel teaches political philosophy at Harvard University. His writings—on justice, ethics, democracy, and markets—have been translated into 27 languages. His course “Justice” is the first Harvard course to be made freely available online and on television. It has been viewed by tens of millions of people around the world, including in China, where Sandel was named the “most influential foreign figure of the year.” (China Newsweek)
with Martha Minow and Jerome Groopman
Martha Minow is the former dean of Harvard Law School, where she has taught since 1981. An expert in human rights and advocacy for members of racial and religious minorities and for women, children, and persons with disabilities. she also writes and teaches about digital communications, democracy, privatization, military justice, and ethnic and religious conflict. She is the auther of over a dozen books, including her most recent, When Should Law Forgive?
Jerome Groopman is professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, Chief of Experimental Medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and one of the world's leading researchers in cancer and AIDS. He is a staff writer for The New Yorker and is the author of The Measure of Our Days, Second Opinions, The Anatomy of Hope, How Doctors Think, and the recently released Your Medical Mind.
An Historical Perspective on an Historical Moment
with Jill Lepore
Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper '41 Professor of History at Harvard University. She is also a staff writer for The New Yorker and the host of the podcast The Last Archive. A prolific essayist, Lepore writes about American history, law, literature, and politics. She is the author of many award-winning books, including the international bestseller, These Truths: A History of the United States.
with Jeremy England
Dr. Jeremy England is a theoretical biophysicist whose research has used statistical physics to explain the spontaneous emergence of life. Previously a physics professor at MIT and a Rhodes Scholar, he now leads a pharma research team working at the intersection of genomics and machine learning, and also serves as a principal research scientist at Georgia Tech. His new book, Every Life is On Fire, is both a book about physics and a d'var Torah (a lesson or sermon that interprets a text).
with Amb. Nicholas Burns
Nicholas Burns is the Roy and Barbara Goodman Family Professor of the Practice of Diplomacy and International Relations at Harvard Kennedy School. He has served as the U.S. ambassador to Greece and to NATO and as the State Department's third-ranking official when he led negotiations on a long-term military assistance agreement with Israel. He is Chairman of the Board of Our Generation Speaks, which seeks to bring together young Palestinians and Israelis in common purpose.
with Ruth Wisse and Ari Hoffman
Ruth Wisse is is Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Tikvah Fund and Martin Peretz Professor of Yiddish Literature Emerita, Harvard University. Her classic, Jews and Power, was recently released in a second edition by Shocken/Nextbook.
Ari Hoffman is a columnist at The Forward, where he writes about politics, culture, and the arts. He holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from Harvard and a J.D. from Stanford Law School.
with Elisa New
Elisa New is a professof of American literature at Harvard University. The author of numerous books, she is also the creator and host of Poetry in America, a public television series and educational initiative to encourage engagement with American poetry beyond the art's existing academic audience. Guests have included Shaquille O'Neal, Bono, Cynthia Nixon, Elena Kagan, Joe Biden, and many others.
with Prof. Howard Gardner and Wendy Fischman
Prof. Howard Gardner is the Hobbs Research Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. A recipient of the McArthur Fellowship and the author of 30 books and hundreds of articles, Gardner is best known in educational circles for his theory of multiple intelligences. He has twice been selected by Foreign Policy and Prospect magazines as one of the 100 most influential public intellectuals in the world.
Wendy Fischman is the project director of Project Zero at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, which seeks to understand and enhance learning, thinking, and creativity for individuals and groups in the arts and other disciplines. She is the lead author of Making Good: How Young People Cope with Moral Dilemmas at Work and the forthcoming The Once and Future College.
with Alan Garber
Alan Garber MD, PhD is provost of Harvard University. He is also the Mallinckrodt Professor of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School, a Professor of Economics in the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Professor of Public Policy in the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and Professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management in the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. An economist and physician, he studies methods for improving health care productivity and health care financing.
with Noah Feldman
Noah Feldman specializes in constitutional studies, with a particular emphasis on the relationship between law and religion, free speech, constitutional design, and the history of legal theory. The Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, he is also a Senior Fellow of the Society of Fellows at Harvard. In 2003 he served as senior constitutional advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, and subsequently advised members of the Iraqi Governing Council on the drafting of the Transitional Administrative Law or interim constitution. He is the author of eight books.
with Joshua Foer and Paul Goldberger
Joshua Foer is a writer and entrepreneur who co-created the Sukkah City design competition and co-founded Sefaria, an online library of Jewish texts. His books, Moonwalking with Einstein and Atlas Obscura were both No. 1 bestsellers.
Paul Goldberger is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and was previously the architecture critic for The New Yorker. He is the author of numerous books and won the 1984 Pulitzer Prize. Goldberger holds the Joseph Urban Chair in Design and Architecture at The New School in New York City and war formerly dean of the Parsons School of Design at The New School.
with Michael Osterholm
Michael Osterholm PhD, MPH is Chair in Public Health, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy and professor in the Technological Leadership Institute, College of Science and Engineering, at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of the 2017 book Deadliest Enemy: Our War Against Killer Germs, in which he details the most pressing infectious disease threats of our day and lays out a nine-point strategy on how to address them, with preventing a global flu pandemic at the top of the list.
with Justice Stephen Breyer
Stephen Breyer is an Associate Justice on the United States Supreme Court. Previously, he was a professor at Harvard Law School and at Harvard Kennedy School. He also served as Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit.
with Mike Greenberg
Mike Greenberg is a host of ESPN's morning show Get Up. For almost two decades, sports fans woke up with Greenberg (Greeny, as he is called) as half of ESPN Radio's Mike & Mike with co-host Mike Golic. Greenberg was inducted into the National Association of Broadcasters' Broadcasting Hall of Fame and the National Radio Hall of Fame in 2018.
with Nathan Jeffay, Maayan Jaffe-Hoffman, and Amos Haarel
Nathan Jeffay is a journalist with the Times of Israel.
Maayan Jaffe-Hoffman is a journalist with the Jerusalem Post.
Amos Haarel is a journalist with Haaretz.
with Martha Minow, Noah Feldman, Susannah Heschel, and Rabbi Joseph Polak
Martha Minow is a professor at Harvard Law School, where she formerly served as dean, and is the 300th Anniversary University Professor at Harvard University.
Noah Feldman is the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law and director of the Julis-Rabinowitz Program on Jewish and Israeli Law at Harvard Law School.
Susannah Heschel is the Eli M. Black Distinguished Professor and chair of the Jewish Studies program at Dartmouth College.
Rabbi Joseph Polak is the Chief Justice of the Boston Rabbinical Court and an adjunct professor at Boston University School of Public Health.
B
Lawrence Bacow
Lila Corwin Berman
Lloyd Blankfein
Sarah Botstein
Stephen Breyer
David Brooks
Larry Brown
Liz Burdock
Nicholas Burns
D
Idan Dershowitz
Ziven Drake
Lydia Dugdale
Danielle Durchslag
E
Arnold Eisen
Ezekiel Emanuel
Jeremy England
Greg Epstein
F
Noah Feldman (The Judiciary Crisis in Israel)
Noah Feldman (Reflections on Coronavirus and Passover)
Noah Feldman (When Should Law Forgive?)
Michael Fertik
Wendy Fischman
Joshua Foer
Benjamin Friedman
Thomas Friedman
G
Alan Garber
Howard Gardner
Mike Greenberg
Jonathan Greenblatt
Jerome Groopman
H
Amos Haarel
Yossi Klein Halevi
Susannah Heschel
Rabbi Shai Held (Ethics and Coronavirus)
Rabbi Shai Held (Remembring Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel)
Ari Hoffman
Sarah Hurwitz
J
Maayan Jaffe-Hoffman
Nathan Jeffay
L
Nicholas Lemann
Jill Lepore
Steven Levitsky
Matty Lichtenstein
Tzipi Livni
M
William R. Marks
Walter Russell Mead
David N. Meyers
Martha Minow (Hope, Justice, and Forgiveness)
Martha Minow (When Should Law Forgive?)
O
Mark Oppenheimer
Evan Osnos
Michael Osterholm
P
Rachel Pachter
Steven Pinker
Rabbi Joseph Polak
Michael Pollan
Robert Putnam
S
Pardis Sabeti
Michael Sandel
Nomi Stolzenberg
